


The Embers of London.

by TenDollarT



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Other, Synthesis Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25440760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TenDollarT/pseuds/TenDollarT
Summary: The Reaper War has ended, and change has come.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Liara T'Soni
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	The Embers of London.

The husks come on foot and from Reaper landing ships, groaning, swaying, scampering; their dimly glowing bodies like dying circuits in deep water. They come to London to commit their last dim thoughts to the proffered fields of glowing holo-terminals before staggering into the furnaces. The Reapers did not convert them ever caring that they might be people again and the sole comfort the living can offer them is a chance to interface and pass along a scrap of awareness, a fragment of a name, a last flash of memory that might answer someone's anguished plea as to the fate of the person they used to be.

Liara stands on the sloped ruins of Big Ben as they come, their minds like fitful sparks she barely can notice against the webs of light defining the new reality.

Shepard's reality.

Liara wipes her eyes.

The galaxy Shepard touched, loved, and left; Liara's life in macrocosm.

Below her the furnaces whuff and crunch. They are converted H-3 starship engines control by levers and strikers, actuated by the Dronn.

Though Dronn frames are heavy with industrial components their avatars are long-faced and mournful like bloodhound dogs wed to great apes. They drone out baritone song-signals of penance and pain as they sway, waiting as husks gather to be destroyed.

In their own time the Dronn had reached the stars after thousands of years of berserk instinctual violence. A great warlord-prophet had dominated their tribes in displays of merciless slaughter that inspired a belief that he was spirit-ridden and mad, but madder still for demanding submission come with a renunciation of the howling thrill of gorging on living meat and tasting hot blood. Instead the Mad One demanded introspection and discipline with gruesome execution being defiance's reward.

The Dronn the galaxy met were patient, introspective, and pacifistic.

Then the Reapers came. The Dronn resist the call to fight, serving as support and logistics and by the time came that they en-mass renounced their philosophies of restraint and caution their Cycle was already doomed.

The Reapers employed their terrible savagery as movement models for later Brute amalgams.

For this limitless spiritual debt the Dronn have refused Reconstitution. Now they operate the furnaces, destroying the Reapers' victims in their own turn.

Above the Eyk spin and spiral, a hundred lenses set in winged carbon frames that ride the incinerating thermals of the furnaces, calling in signal busts that ring like sonic ripples through thought-space. When Liara touches their minds they pulse back their curiosity and joy, sharing their contentment at being buoyed into the darkened skies on ash thermals.

In their Cycle the Eyk were low-order prey creatures, fearful and furtive. They'd been taken as avian pets and mistakenly Reaperized before their sentience was noticed and cataloged and recorded. On their home world they'd known comfort as the illusory safety of their scattered colonies and hope as ever-temporary concealment. In this time they were drones and though it confused some the Eyk felt no rush to be Reconstituted. In their new forms their communities where united by Synthesis and protected from predation by their artificial forms. What did they get from rushing to be fragile and fearful and vulnerable? Caged and isolated? No answer besides their own interests them.

Around the tides of husks stranger forms dance. Moving on pin-tipped legs these frames whirl and flail, flopping to the ground in paroxysms of exaggerated suffering before flipping upright and lurching along with the shuffling dead. From the perspective broadcast by the Eyk they move in flawless synchronicity like a living mandela.

They are the Eldarii, of the faction announcing itself as the Psychopomps, and the Eldarii demand to be Reconstituted **first**.

In their Cycle they were the capricious, omnipotent masters of the Milky Way. The other species knew them as terrible pirates and callous imperialists and merciless settlers and these are all things they cry out that they will be again when the galaxy gets it's priorities straight and re-embodies their supremacy in flesh. That they were consumed and entombed like thousands of others counts for little; extinction was no lasting judgement on their manifest greatness.

And yet when told their home planets, now known as barren twin worlds of Aphras in the Xe Cha system, were blasted lifeless by the Reapers the Eldarii shrug. They acknowledged that this was unfortunate, but they'd mastered terraforming and themselves were living records of their planetary ecosystems. When restored it might take them a few centuries to reassemble their mastery of gene-spinning to commence a bacteria-baseline revivification of life on Aphras but it was hardly an impossible project. Naturally mind-linked like the Rachni the Eldarii had experienced being psychically crammed together and AI shackled by the Reapers as a kind of irritating confinement that came with the quietly feared chance of accidental extermination when the Reapers themselves were destroyed.

As cruel as the Batarians, as brilliant as the Salarians, and as long-lived as the Asari the Eldarii laugh at the idea of treating anyone or anything as their equal.

Ambitious, elitist, and beautiful the Eldarii openly expect to contest any and every people for dominance of the coming Age. And yet the Psychopomps snicker as they relate a begrudgingly accepted awareness of their own natures inflicted by confinement and isolation. Their extermination by the Reapers was aided by those peoples they'd oppressed; the Eldarii had not fallen alone, but they did fall first. Maybe it would be enough to just be alive again. Perhaps this second chance was an impossibly precious gift unto itself. The duality of minds unified in awareness and yet at ease as individuals is something the Eldarii well understand; perhaps they could be the example the galaxy needs instead yet another scourge for it to endure and to eventually destroy.

As the Psychopomps dance their movements themselves are signals and data, kinetic emotion and psychic influence. As they pass the herds of husks stand slightly straighter, move with more immediate awareness of their mortal release. As the dancers pass the pens containing the surviving surrendered Banshees cease pulsing with the pain and dread and hatred of their desperate cargo. Just this momentary relief from the hells of their Reaperized bodies gives them clarity they will slowly drain like a man dying of thirst nurses the last of his canteen. 

The Eldarii say the Banshees can be reclaimed. The Asari want them to prove they can. The Eyk spin and swirl and squeak and the Dronn groan out their tragic debt in the perpetual towers of smoke rising into Earth's skies and they are only three peoples among thousands.

Compared to resurrection of the kakliosaur species from fossil dna the rebirth of species sampled, recorded, and exterminated by the Reapers is effortless; each of their massive shells part genocide apparatus and part mausoleum complete with preserved tanks of genetic slurry as the basis for this very process. It was as their creators intended, after all. 

The galaxy promises to be crowded in Shepard's future.

Looking within Liara gingerly touches her belly and again mentally quests for a connection.

And again the same answer: sleepy affection. A tiny light ringing with steady certainty that it's time is coming even as it's dna unspools and it's cells copy and divide and copy and divide in the billion-fold steps of replication and continuance.

This too is Shepard's future: a galaxy teeming with life, love, and hope she knew she would never live to see but that she fought for with her every existing moment. Not a place where suffering would be banished, but where suffering would be overshadowed by the sometimes only momentary but genuine understanding of how good it was to be alive. To be one of the truly lucky ones who got to _be_ at all.

Fin.

**Author's Note:**

> Because Synthesis is only monstrous if you want it to be.
> 
> This is also the truncated conclusion of a Mass Effect epic I have long had in my head. To the many writers struggle with writer's block I offer you this respectful nod: it's no better to have ideas and yet to lack the will to see them done. If you've ever read _Mass Effect: Corrosion_ on ff.net this is essentially how that ends.


End file.
